"I would have let the group discussion activity go for longer, but I needed to get the game that I had planned." Good for you planning a game.  (Good, at least, if the game actually stimulates English use, and keeps the kids in their Zone of Proximal Development.)  But even if it's a good game that you have planned, if you have a group discussion ... or a drill ... or some other sort of elicitation activity underway, and that activity has momentum, then there is only one thing that justifies ending that ante-lascivial activity.  There is only one reason why such an activity should stop.  It should stop when it is finished. At ProGEN, we encourage (I would say we require, but the reality is that many of our otherwise brilliant teachers get away with not doing it) -- we encourage our teachers to conceptualize a lesson as a succession of actions (actually, we call whatever recipe you are using to guide your lesson an action bucket); and we encourage them to define each of those ACTIONS in terms if the action's completion conditions.  "This action will be complete when I can hear the students volunteering variations of the target language to each other, and they are at peak engagement with this challenge."  This means ... (a) don't cut it off if you can still feel the activity building towards your completion conditions (or if you feel the student's engagement pushing beyond what you had anticipated its potential to be), and (b) don't kill time by letting it drag on and on, long after the kids have gotten the point.  Conclude your action where it naturally concludes. You wrote a lesson plan, and it's purpose is to serve you, not the other way around. "I would have used a different model conversation than what is in the book; but that's what's expected." I love how ESL teachers that took an expository writing course in college or high school, which exhorts them not to over-use the passive voice suddenly find it so useful when it comes to decisions they make concerning the use of a textbook. "We are expected to cover these pages." "I was told that the exercises on this page are important." "It was decided that this would be the primary textbook." And that's fine if you need blame to fall elsewhere on the question of whether or not whatever material you have is the right material.  But in my experience of observing many, many schools, there is only one textbook that I find to be truly harmful and that would be Expressways.  I said it, now let's move on. Even in the case of Expressways, I have never seen anybody teach a bad class specifically because of the textbook.  In fact, a book like Expressways (I'm not moving on, am I) forces you dig deep, glean what is most useful and then shape it into something that really meets the students where they are. No matter what the book, the mistake is the same.  Even the best textbooks do not know your kids.  You know your kids. You (or somebody big and powerful) bought this textbook (perhaps even with your input, which is often the case with our teachers), but that book will kill any value that you might otherwise potentially bring to the room unless first you make the material your own.  It's purpose is to serve you, not the other way around.